


So Put Another Dime In the Jukebox, Baby

by Eatsscissors



Category: The Vampire Diaries
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-27
Updated: 2011-01-27
Packaged: 2017-10-15 03:40:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/156668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eatsscissors/pseuds/Eatsscissors
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jenna finds out about vampires.  There is really only one way to handle that.  Spoilers through "Masquerade."</p>
            </blockquote>





	So Put Another Dime In the Jukebox, Baby

**Author's Note:**

> For Elle_Blessing. Happy Holidays!

Alaric took her to her last hospital visit and waited with her the entire time, even though she told him more than once that he didn't have to. "I'm pretty sure that walking into a knife is going to be a one-time occurrence in my life," Jenna joked as she squirmed a little in the hard-backed plastic chair and resisted the urge to surreptitiously pick at the stitches through her blouse. They had been itching so badly over the past few days that it was all that she could do to wait for her official medical okay rather than just handling it herself with a vegetable knife.

 _No, not a vegetable knife. Something much bigger. They discussed this._

Alaric's smile slipped a little, making Jenna wonder if her momentary confusion had not been evident on her face, before he leaned close so that he could put his arm around her. For a few seconds, Jenna had a flash of something inside of her head that looked and sounded terribly like Elena, but moving in ways that Elena never would have, like there was someone else beneath the skin.

Alaric felt her stiffen; he pulled back a little, keeping his face close to hers, and asked, "Is everything okay?"

"Fine." Jenna smiled as she tried to shake off the sudden chill that had come over her. She didn't remember much about the hours immediately after she had hurt herself, but Alaric told her that Elena was the one who helped to control the bleeding while he had called for an ambulance. Maybe some of that seeped through as an almost-memory; Jenna couldn't stop thinking of her niece and of blood, and she wasn't sure why. "I'm fine." She squeezed at Alaric's hand. "Thank you for coming with me."

"No way I was going to leave you alone." Alaric made his point by refusing to let go of her hand even while Jenna heard her name being called and really needed to be getting to her feet, and this was getting weird. Sweet, in the way that having an actual adult boyfriend with a job and issues that didn't involve run-ins with the law—run-ins of which Jenna is aware, wouldn't that be just the thing—was sweet, but still strange.

"Um, all right." Jenna, laughing a little, managed to untangle her hand so that she could and let the nurse know that she would be there in just a minute. "But this isn't exactly the hard part. I can be a good girl and see if they'll even give me a lollipop." Alaric was still watching her with an intensity that, no—it made sense, with his own wife, but Jenna had kinda thought that she was leaving the stalker boyfriend thing behind her when she got into grad school. And yet, it still managed to be endearing, even a little cute. _There are parts of you that are always going to be a little warped, just deal with it._

Jenna didn't even see a doctor while the stitches themselves were being removed, just a nurse who wore gloves and removed the threads with quick, efficient snips. She used a pair of scissors that looked as if they ought to have been employed on Jenna's cuticles, apologizing when she tugged too hard. Jenna tried to control her wincing and assured the nurse, who had a strange pink scar that looked almost like an animal bite healing on the side of her neck, that it was fine, but she couldn't stop staring at the blade. It was a lot smaller than the one that she managed to walk/fall right into, but Jenna's scar was also a lot smaller than what she would have expected, too. The knife hadn't gone long, it had gone deep. She stared hard at the scissors snipping out each thread so that the nurse could tug them free and set them in a little stainless steel dish to be disposed of as a biohazard once the business was done. Jenna felt a prickle against the back of her neck and wanted to shiver, if she hadn't thought that maybe that would jar the nurse's hands. She had to have been nearly sprinting to run a knife resting on the counter that deeply into herself, unless there was someone else standing on the other side. She had asked Elena and Alaric a few times where she was standing when she slipped, so that she could make a note that her haphazard housekeeping skills need some work, and they had been vague each time. Jenna lifted her hair so that she could rub the prickle away.

"You all right? the nurse asked her. "Let me know if I'm getting you too deep."

"No, I'm fine." Jenna dropped her hand. "Just _really_ embarrassed, I've never actually had to explain to an insurance company before that they're getting a claim because their client might just be too stupid to live."

"Hmmm." The nurse started to touch at the side of her neck and stopped herself just in time as she remembered that she was wearing sterile gloves. "You are a long, long way away from the silliest mistake to ever come through the ER, don't worry about it."

"Small comfort," Jenna said dryly. She pulled her shirt back down over her belly once the nurse was finished and then spent an interminably long time waiting for the doctor to come in, look her over for about two minutes, and give her the all clear to go. Jenna was half-waiting for him to tell her that it's safety scissors only from that point forward until she passed a class, but he didn't.

Alaric was right where Jenna left him in the waiting room, still looking much more tense than Jenna thought justified, given that the major medical drama was behind them. He stood upon catching sight of her.

"Everything go all right?" Alaric asked, kissing her. _Check and double-check_ , Jenna thought, _officially weird._ She still kissed him back and then curved her lips against the side of his face as he pulled her into a hug, too.

"Really?" Jenna asked, trying not to laugh as she pushed him away. His wife's body still hadn't been found. If she wanted to do this as the real thing, and Jenna was starting to sometimes startle herself as she realized how much she really, really wanted to do this as the real thing, then she might ought to get used to him suggesting ambulance rides as reasonable responses to stubbed toes. "Clean bill of health, even if it was implied a little bit that maybe I should let other people cut my food from here on." Jenna took a surreptitious look at the rest of the waiting room while Alaric raised his eyebrows at her. It was empty enough. "You want to see my scar?" Before he could answer, she lifted up her shirt high enough so that he could see the short band of pink/red tissue, the tiny dots like mosquito bites from the threads themselves that she had been told will go away within a few weeks. The rest of the scar, not so much, but it wasn't that bad, really.

And, okay, maybe it wasn't the most titillating thing that she had ever done, but come on, they were in a hospital waiting room and Alaric had just been so _weird_ since she hurt herself. Jenna was hoping for a smile, at least, and maybe a little bit of a scandalized laugh as he forced her hand back down until she could remember that she was a grown-up now, and that the guardian of two teenagers did not do things like show her boyfriend her belly in the same room where elderly couples were awaiting the results of very depressing tests. She didn't expect him to look as if she had just slapped him.

 _His wife, moron._ There was a chance that Isobel had simply run away. There was a very good chance that she hadn't, and Jenna could have kicked herself.

"Hey, hey, I'm sorry," she said, reaching up to touch at Alaric's cheek while he reached out to slide his fingers slowly beneath the hem of her blouse, which she had had the good sense to let fall as soon as she saw that look. Jenna would have thought that the area of her scar would be less sensitive to the touch than the rest of her skin, but it was the opposite, and Alaric's fingers nearly scalded her. Jenna threw an ugly look at the old couple who were giving her an ugly look of their own. _Come on, it's pretty obvious that nothing dirty is happening here._ "Relax, I'll be back in a bikini by the end of summer."

Alaric tried to smile, and stroked his fingers lightly down her stomach before he pulled his hand out from beneath her blouse. For someone who still occasionally hesitated to put his hand in the small of her back in front of Elena or Jeremy, Jenna was impressed. She raised her eyebrows; it wasn't the whole story, though, and she knew it.

"It's nothing," Alaric said. _Liar._ "Come on, I want to take you out to dinner."

"The Grille?" Jenna asked hopefully, because some of her prescribed medications had included as their side effects nausea so severe that soup had been a struggle at times, and she couldn't think of a single better way to celebrate her return to health than with a cheeseburger and a few shots of tequila.

Alaric put his arm around her waist as the hospital's pneumatic doors whooshed open for them. "Whatever you want."

There were a few other things in their relationship that had been wisely put on hold while Jenna had been recovering from nearly gutting herself, too, and she grinned at him as he opened up the passenger door of his car for her. "Promise?" she asked, resting her chin against the top of the door and smiling harder when the corner of Alaric's mouth twitched up.

"Where did you say that Elena and Jeremy were going to be tonight?" he asked.

"A party by the lake. I've made each one solemnly swear to tattle on the other if there's any pot or drunk driving." Sometimes Jenna still wasn't certain that she was walking the lines between cool aunt, cool parent, and responsible parent well enough, but she reminded herself each time that she survived her own adolescence with a minimum of undoable trauma, and Elena and Jeremy couldn't possibly be getting themselves into any more trouble than she did. "Check out my responsibility."

Jenna was halfway in the car, but Alaric still looked her up and down as he shut the door, and Jenna laughed. Whatever dream-shade had chased her momentarily her in the hospital was just as rapidly being chased away again, and she felt good. Alaric seemed to have shaken off his funk, too, which was even better; they were going to be a nice, normal couple out for dinner and a few drinks before they went back to his apartment and got reacquainted, because even after only a few weeks of abstinence, Jenna had missed him terribly. It was going to be so wholesomely middle-class that her teenaged self would have been appalled—

Just as Alaric was opening the driver's side door to get into the car himself, a—a _body_ slammed down against the hood hard enough to make the whole vehicle buck. It appeared to have fallen straight down from the sky; Jenna screamed and looked up reflexively, but they were parked too far out from the hospital for it to possibly have been anyone jumping. She flailed for the door handle while Alaric yelled at her to stay inside, wondering wildly if the body had fallen out of a low-flying plane, or been hit by a car hard enough to send it flying—but she had heard neither an engine revving nor a scream of brakes—there was a dark line of arterial blood arcing up across Alaric's windshield—

The body moved. Jenna did the only sensible thing and screamed again. Alaric yelled her name and grabbed for her arm as she tried to throw open the door again and go help what was clearly a grievously injured person. There were dark lines spreading out from around the man's eyes that reminded Jenna of how her own stitches had looked when she had peeled back the bandages on her abdomen to peek at the wound, and Jenna wondered for half a second how anyone could possibly bruise like _that_ before she noticed that the man's eyes were also filled up with blood, glassy-black in the security lights.

"Jenna, stay in the car!" Alaric yelled at her. He yanked her back by her upper arm hard enough to hurt and left Jenna gaping at him as he leapt out the driver's side door again and crossed around to the front of the vehicle. The body on the hood twisted around—Jenna did not see the angle of a terribly broken spine pushing up against the back of the man's tee shirt, she didn't, she didn't—and opened his mouth to hiss, like a snake or a cat. The veiny bruises around his eyes were not going away.

 _Elena had drawn patterns on herself with her own eyeliner, and had Jenna wanted to ask her when she became a five year-old again and if this was some kind of new trend she was going to be commiserating with Liz Forbes about, but then she had become fixated with Elena's colored contacts. Afterwards--_

Alaric reached for something up the sleeve of his jacket, staying back from the man on his hood the same way that someone would a rabid dog, while a blurry figure raced up to the car, grabbed the body by the front of its shirt, and bodily hurled it down to the asphalt. Jenna tried to close her mouth and couldn't, tried to tell herself that she didn't see her boyfriend slam a long stick of wood down into the chest of the man while a second figure held him down for him and couldn't do that, either. She breathed so hard that she was nearly hyperventilating and tried very hard not to be sick into her own lap as the second figure straightened and resolved himself into Damon Salvatore. He looked through the windshield, saw Jenna sitting in the passenger seat, and mouthed something that Jenna didn't need to hear in order to read: "Oh, this is not good."

*  
Alaric had dropped his keys in the front seat when he had lunged out of the car to do murder to an injured—Jenna's brain didn't want to complete the circuit, but to an injured _something_ , to an injured _someone_. It was his own fault, then, that he was now locked outside of his car while Jenna remained in the passenger seat with the keys clutched in own hand and her cellular phone in the other, trying very hard to make a decision. There was still a body lying in front of Alaric's car, the wooden stake with which he had killed it sticking up out of its chest with a bizarre jauntiness, as if at any moment it might wave to her. Damon Salvatore was sitting in the dent that the falling form had made in Alaric's hood, chewing contemplatively on one of his cuticles and staring up at the night sky. And Alaric was leaning up against the passenger door while he tried very hard to get Jenna to let him in.

 _I should call the police._ No, really? She might have already made herself an accomplice by waiting this long. But something had—something in the man's face, the way that he had had those terrible, blood-burst eyes and bruises that somehow weren't, had resonated with the strange, unsettled feeling of _before_ that Jenna had been battling with ever since reaching the hospital, and that kept her finger away from the 9 and the 1 on her keypad. For now. It did not, however, mean that she was about to let anyone else into the car with her.

"Jenna." Alaric was leaning up against the passenger door too large to go unnoticed, but he still rapped his knuckles against the window in order to get her attention, as he thought that she might have gone into shock. Jenna could barely hear him through the glass; he was speaking in the low, soothing tone that one would use on a trapped and frightened animal, or someone holding a pair of scissors. Or a knife, aimed at her own stomach. Jenna took a deep breath and let it out again as Alaric continued, "I promise, I can—I can explain, if you just open the door and let me talk to you."

There had been a hand on the knife when it had entered her stomach, and the wrist had ended in a sweater that looked very much like the ruined one, bloodstained and in pieces from where surgeons had cut it off of her, that Jenna had been wearing upon her entrance to the ER. She remembered that far, in flashes and jolts. Taking another deep breath, Jenna leaned over so that she could insert Alaric's keys into the ignition and start the car. He immediately started to look relieved. He also looked guilty as hell, but he had been wearing that expression ever since Jenna had locked herself inside the car in the first place.

Jenna cracked the window by an inch rather than opening the door. Her cellular phone was still in her hand, but the parking lot was empty, of _course_ , this was going to have to be her decision alone, one way or the other. _There had been something wrong with Elena's face, long after and before she had washed the eyeliner off._ "What the _fuck_?" Jenna asked, rather than the detailed and exquisite telling-off that she had had mapped out in her head. Now that she didn't have the keys to occupy it she noticed, she had begun cradling her free hand against her scar.

"Okay," Alaric said. "Jenna, I need you to listen to me. That—" He pointed towards the corpse. "Is not a person."

"Hey," Damon remarked mildly from his position on the hood. He looked at Jenna through the glass, and in the moonlight his eyes were very blue and very cold. "No one likes a racist, 'Ric."

Alaric's head jerked Damon's way as if he meant to glare and caught himself just in time. "It's a vampire," he said to Jenna; he really needed to stop using that gentle tone if he was going to be saying things like that, as if Jenna was the crazy one in this conversation. "Mystic Falls has a lot of them, and most of them are very bad…people." Damon raised his head from the cuticle that was so fascinating and beamed sunnily.

"You are completely insane," Jenna told Alaric flatly. Her finger came its closest yet to dialing for the authorities.

Damon was too far away for Jenna to hear his huffing noise through the cracked window, but he still managed to convey the impression throughout his entire body as he hopped down from the hood. "We're going to be here for the next six hours unless you let me handle this," he said to Alaric, and then leaned up close to the window, face not quite touching the glass. Jenna leaned back slightly without knowing why, but she still had a good view. "Jenna," Damon said in the tone that he used whenever he had been staring at Elena for too long, had noticed that Jenna had noticed, and wanted to quick-fix his way back into her good graces again. He smiled at her.

One, he had fangs. Two, when he closed his eyes and then opened them again, his irises had gone completely to black and there was the exact same kind of bruising spreading around his eyes as had been on the now-corpse when he had landed on Alaric's hood. Jenna screamed again and leapt backwards into the passenger seat, jabbing herself painfully in the backside with the gearshift and losing her cell phone to the floorboard in the process. She scrabbled for the keys while Alaric punched Damon in the arm no harder than he would a recalcitrant sibling and said, "Damnit, Damon."

"I need the tarp in the back of your car, we can't just leave him here all night," Damon snapped back, throwing his arm out to indicate the corpse half-lit by the glow of the headlights. "We're lucky that someone hasn't come through already."

They were right, Mystic Falls General obviously had the worst security in the world, but that didn't explain why Alaric was responding as he would to a small child, "You can handle this without the tarp." He flapped his hand at Damon. "Give me a minute to talk to her alone." Damon rolled his eyes, but left the window so that he could hoist the corpse up and onto his shoulder, no more signs of strain in his bearing that Jenna felt while carrying in a sack of groceries. He gave Alaric a private sort of look and then—he was gone. Jenna vaguely saw a blur crossing the parking lot, but Damon Salvatore was no longer there.

"Okay," Alaric said, putting his hands up against the window. "He's gone. Jenna, come on, talk to me."

"What is he?" Jenna asked, pointing in the direction that Damon had gone, though she thought that she already had her answer. One plus one equals two; that didn't mean that she _wanted_ to know.

"He's a vampire," Alaric said, reasonably calmly. "Not, uh, one of the bad ones." He hesitated just a bit too much over the words for Jenna's liking. "Anymore. Usually."

There were vampires in the first place, let alone "good ones" and "bad ones." Jenna considered for a few seconds with her body half-slid into the passenger seat, her hand on the keys, and her foot angled over enough that she could at least reach the gas pedal. She had ill-advisedly stayed with a boyfriend for a full three weeks after he told her that he only did a little coke now and then during her sophomore year at college, but this was…this was just a little beyond that. She thought that there ought to be a clause covering "associating with the undead" way before a ring touched anyone's finger.

Jenna took the key out of the ignition, and Alaric visibly breathed a sigh of relief as Jenna finished wiggling the rest of the way into his seat so that she could exit out the driver's door. If he noticed that she slid his keys into her pocket rather than handing them back over, he chose not to say anything. "How long?" she asked softly.

"I came to Mystic Falls hunting one of them," Alaric said, though his eyes were hooded. "The one who tu—who killed Isobel." Jenna noted the stumble, and she counted herself as a connoisseur of lying men at this point, but the heart of it was true in his face, and it made sense with the way that he had been so—oddly focused for a grieving husband when they had first met. She wondered at the details.

"So for as long as you've known me," Jenna said. She heard the same flat note in her voice that Jeremy and Elena got whenever they had pissed her off enough so that she pulled on the heavy-duty parenting gloves. Alaric got approximately the same look on his face that Jeremy and Elena also got when they realized that Fun Aunt Jenna had gone away for the time being.

"I was trying to keep you safe," Alaric said.

"Safe?" Jenna yelped, and someone just pulling up into a parking space three cars over looked curiously through their window at her. Oh, okay, so no one could manage to come outside when there had been a body lying in front of Alaric's car, but she had plenty of witnesses to her apparent attack of the crazy. She would have kept yelling if Alaric had not winced again and made a shushing motion at her until the driver of the car had gone into the hospital with a bouquet of daisies in his hand. "My niece is friends with someone who _drinks blood_ , I think that that trumps my own safety. She needs to know about this—"

Someone cleared their throat delicately from behind Jenna. She jumped and spun to see Damon Salvatore standing behind her with his hip cocked up against Alaric's car like he was an extra in a greaser movie. Jenna hadn't heard him come up behind her, and she _knew_ that he had not been gone long enough to dispose of a body with any kind of human speed. The only drugs that Jenna was currently on were a few "just in case" preventative antibiotics, and she only had a few more days of those at that, but she couldn't help but wonder if there had been some kind of mix-up at the pharmacy.

Alaric's face was never going to lose that pained expression. "Elena already knows what Damon is," he said. "And, ah, Stefan."

" _My niece is dating a vampire?_ " She was back to shouting. She was also back to not caring about the shouting.

"He's not my _adopted_ brother," Damon said, sounding slightly aggrieved and as if he expected better of her. "And you'll notice that you haven't seen our dear old dad running around, so…" He made an expansive gesture. Jenna was not certain whether it was meant to imply that Stefan, Damon, or both had killed Dad, and she wasn't sure that she wanted to. She turned back to Alaric, who was probably going to be wearing that guilty look for the rest of his life. _Good._

There was really only one thing left to do. Jenna drew back her fist and punched Alaric at the juncture where his arm became his shoulder, hard. He yelped, and Damon let out an appreciative whistle from behind them.

"This is _not_ something that we can handle at The Grille," she informed him.

*  
On a very good day, the bar that Damon took them to could be called a honky-tonk, though on anything short of that it was really just a dive. Jenna eyed it dubiously as Damon pulled Alaric's SUV to a halt—how Damon had wound up behind the wheel in the first place Jenna was not entirely certain, since she last recalled that she had been the one carrying Alaric's keys, but it had involved a lot of sideways, wordless looks between Damon and Alaric and flagrantly unethical uses of charm.

"This bar has a lot of bad days," Jenna announced. Alaric turned from the passenger seat so that he could look at her, worry-line drawn down between his eyes. He had wanted to sit in the back with her. She had not wanted him that close to her.

"Jenna, are you sure that you're okay?" he asked, and then looked at Damon. Damon looked back, and they had another of those moments where Jenna could tell that a whole conversation was happening without words, and she really, really hated that. Not least of all because she knew that the conversation was about her; if she had been told while she was and undergrad that one of the few healthy, adult relationships of her life was going to be with a man who abruptly revealed himself as a vampire hunter whose best friend bore an unfortunate resemblance to one of the vampires, she would have rolled her eyes and taken another tab of E.

" _No,_ " Alaric said sharply, getting out of the car by way of ending the conversation. Damon rolled his eyes like it was an aerobic sport and he was three days behind on his last workout.

"Whatever, it wouldn't work, anyway. Elena's been putting vervain into Jenna's shampoo," he said. "I can smell it."

Jenna and Elena were going to have a very long talk just as soon as Jenna got home; she wasn't sure what the disciplinary guidelines were for discovering that your ward had been hiding knowledge of the undead from you for almost a year, but she would figure it out. For the moment, though, she only smelled lightly of the ends of her hair and, discovering nothing more than her own strawberry-almond conditioner and maybe a hint of cologne from where Alaric had been hugging her earlier, asked, "What is he talking about?"

Alaric had opened the back door of the SUV for her and held out his hand. The slightly out of place gallantry that he could display from time to time was one of the things that Jenna was growing to more-than-like-let's-not-go-there about him, but she still stared at his hand for a long time before she took it so that he could help her down. "Vampires can compel humans into forgetting certain things," he said. "They're allergic to vervain, though. It protects humans from some of their powers and can hurt them if they ingest it."

"So you're saying that Elena has been slipping me roofies for the past year," Jenna said flatly. She wanted to pull her hand out of Alaric's, but she didn't. For now. "How much else haven't I been told?"

"Look," Damon said. He cocked his hip against the hood of Alaric's car and, friends or not, Jenna did not miss the way that Alaric angled his body just slightly in front of hers, as if he was going to take the brunt of an attack into himself first before it could reach her. "Do you really want to keep talking about all of this sober? 'Cause it loses some of its charm when you have to face it head-on."

"It's violence and destruction, Damon," Alaric said without taking his eyes off of Jenna. "That's how it's supposed to work." He leaned in close to her while Damon snorted and started twirling Alaric's keys around his index finger. "Are we going to be okay?" he asked her.

Jenna stared at him for a long time and then finally answered, "I think that I would like some tequila before I answer that question."

*  
Four shots in, Jenna still didn't have her answer, but she was getting a lot better at asking the questions. "So, wait," she said, leaning across a table that she probably didn't want to rest her elbows against too often or for too long, but if that turned out to be the biggest problem that she faced for the rest of the night she was still going to call it good. Alaric was carefully, solicitously giving her her space, though that reservation was fast dissolving with every drink he took, and his hand was finding its way to her arm more and more often, like he wanted to reassure himself that she hadn't run away or died without his notice. Jenna remembered what he had just almost let slip to her about Isobel and corrected herself: or wanted to be sure that she was still human. It had been her practice to move his hand away every time that she caught it on her since entering the bar, "p.s. vampires are real" being just a little bigger than stealing her cable, but after her third shot and the third time that she noticed it there, she let it stay.

Damon didn't seem all that different drunk than he did when he was sober, save for maybe a little more _actually_ relaxed rather than the deliberately over the top parody of not giving a damn that Jenna had noticed him putting on all night long. She had thought about majoring in psychology for a full three semesters before she had realized how much math actually went into running a study, she could still notice things. He was slouching down in his chair, giving Jenna a head-tilted look that was making Alaric move closer to her, though Jenna didn't think that he even realized that he was doing it. She didn't think that it was because he thought that Damon Salvatore was going to woo her away, either. _Is being friends with a vampire like being friends with a large and half-feral dog, you always have to be keeping an eye on the grill to make sure that it's not running away with the steak?_ And on second thought, she wasn't certain that she liked her place within that analogy, either.

"I'm impressed, Jenna," Damon said, sounding even like he meant it. "You've handled this really well." He made a dismissive gesture. "I mean, except for the screaming."

"Not everyone screams when they learn about you guys," Alaric said mildly. His arm had found its way around Jenna's shoulders. She gave it a slit-eyed look and decided that she could let it stay. On one condition, which Alaric was going to learn about in just a moment.

"No, sometimes they take out melodramatic and pointless vows of vengeance," Damon said, and gave Alaric a smile with teeth that were just a little bit too long. The waitress, coming by at exactly the wrong time, blinked and started to say something until Damon caught her eyes and gave her a very deliberate stare. As she wandered away again, looking just a touch dazed, Alaric leaned over and punched Damon in the arm, hard.

"Stop that, you're going to give someone brain cancer."

That—that eye thing had been done to her at some point, by someone who had looked like Elena but really wasn't, and Jenna was not kidding that Elena had no idea how grounded she was when Jenna finally roused herself out of bed the next morning. Jenna decided to focus, and also probably have another shot. Because firstly, what Alaric had said and what Damon had said only made sense when they were combined with _another_ thing that Alaric had said.

"You were at my house watching football last Saturday," she pointed out to Damon, literally pointing her finger over the table at him. He blinked a little bit find her jabbing an appendage at him so abruptly, but didn't seem terribly threatened.

"And you're a cheap drunk, apparently," Damon said, one eyebrow going up.

"Not hardly," Jenna said, though she did lower her finger. "I stopped being friends with a girl in college because I found out that she had stolen my flatiron to sell for cocaine. It was a really nice one."

"That is a charming story, Jenna," Damon told her, and then glared at Alaric when Alaric punched him in the arm again. "That ring only stops me from killing you, you know."

"That ring stops him from killing you?" Jenna craned her neck to look at the ring that was now dangling over her shoulder and took the opportunity to do the latest shot that the waitress had brought for her, noticing as she did so that Alaric's eyes watched her mouth as she bit into her lime. It had been three weeks since they had last been friendly, but there was still that tiny little matter of lying to her about vampires so that she went and got stabbed by one thing standing in the way. "I wondered why you never took it off, even when we're—" She threw a look at Damon. "Never mind."

"Like that was a secret." This time, Jenna punched him, and he even jumped a little before raising his eyebrows at her.

"To return to my original point," Jenna insisted. "I stopped talking to a girl for _taking my shit_ before. That's way below the threshold of killing my spouse." She knew that a line had been crossed when Alaric flinched, hard, and Damon even looked up at the ceiling for a second, which was colorfully plastered with the business cards and bras of patrons who had been there before them.

"She wanted me to," Damon said, at the same time that Alaric answered, "It's complicated."

Jenna hadn't been back on speaking terms with Allison by the time that they had taken their GREs; she had even taken a certain uncharitable glee in the fact that snorting up rather than studying meant that Allison had done so abominably that even terminal MA programs wouldn't look at her. She decided that she wasn't going to ask the next in a long series of questions that she had, because they would be here way, way past last call if that were the case. Instead, she looked towards the stage that was being set up on the far side of the bar, two girls so drunk that they were leaning up against one another and, once or twice, random people at the surrounding tables as they waited for the obvious to start. Jenna turned to Alaric.

"We're going to play a game," she said suddenly.

Alaric laughed a little, and Jenna saw him slide Damon a glance before he took her hands in his. They had been pretty clear about what they had been going to spend the rest of the evening doing after Jenna had gotten her stitches out, back before Damon had thrown a vampire up onto Alaric's car. "Jenna, you're drunk," Alaric said.

"Of that I'm aware, and not nearly so much as you think," Jenna answered. "You have no idea how I used to party." Damon across the table made a face as if he would have liked to see that, and Jenna pointedly ignored him. "We're going to play a game called 'you lied to me, and now you're going to sing karaoke with me to make up for it.'"

Alaric looked pained to the point that Jenna might have asked if he was in the middle of having a heart attack, if not for the fact that she still wasn't entirely clear on how the ring worked. "Jenna, I don't sing," he said.

Jenna leaned forward towards him. "Alaric, vampires are real," she said.

"I think she has you there," Damon offered. He leaned his chair back onto two legs in a rather impressive feat of balance, caught for the waitress's arm, and was clearly about to do the eye thing until Jenna was the one to punch him in the arm, this time. Sinking back into her seat, she caught Alaric smiling at her.

"We'll have another round," Damon said to the waitress, fixing Jenna with a look. A confused expression on her face, the server shrugged. Leaning close to Jenna's chair as she passed, the waitress murmured to her, "Don't bring your ex out with your current squeeze, honey, that never ends well for anyone."

"Did she just call me a 'squeeze'?" Alaric asked, coloring slightly, while Jenna put her hands over her mouth so that she wouldn't giggle.

"You're going to have to do something about her," Damon said, leveling his finger at Jenna, who did her best to look intimidated. She might have done a better job if she hadn't had the tequila in her, but: after a vampire had gotten into so spirited a debate about the Giants' offense in her living room that he forgot he had really come over to pester his brother and Elena, it was hard to take him seriously as a skulking night thing. "And the punching."

"Punching you is the quickest way to make friends with you," Alaric said, and added when Jenna tilted her head at him, "No, really." Damon was leaning back in his chair again and looking vaguely, perhaps even sincerely, disgruntled.

The arm that had been resting passively around her shoulders was now pulling her chair closer, and Jenna was finding herself going along with it. "I think that you have issues," Jenna told Damon, while Alaric made a snorting noise that sounded very much as if he was trying to hold back a laugh and Damon looked as if he wouldn't like anything more than doing that eye-thing at them to make them chicken dance or something. "And I think that you're a cheap drunk," she went on to Alaric.

It was Damon's turn to make a snorting noise. "His liver would be a lot better off if that ring protected from human stupidity instead of just supernatural bogeymen," he said.

Alaric ignored Damon by putting his elbow against the table and twisting his body around so that he was partially blocking Jenna from view, making it just the two of them even though the bar was crowded. "It's the tequila," he told her, mouth quirking for just a second before he grew solemn again. "And I'm glad that you know. It was hard keeping you in the dark."

Her hair falling down around her shoulders, Jenna could smell her shampoo and couldn't stop herself from frowning. "I might not have been stabbed if you hadn't," she told Alaric flatly. _Been stabbed_ was such a passive way of putting it, too, like she really had just fallen in the kitchen like a newborn colt, but her illustrious academic career hadn't really given her the proper verb tenses to describe being psychically commanded to commit seppuku on one's self by a sociopathic vampire who thought it would be funny. God, she had spent weeks having those flashes and feeling terrible about them, thinking that her subconscious thought Elena capable of that, and it hadn't been Elena at all.

Even the quirk was gone. Alaric looked older and afraid, and Jenna thought that maybe she was seeing what he must have looked like in the days immediately after Isobel had disappeared. It was hard not to feel sympathetic, until she reminded herself of three weeks of dreams—nightmares—that she hadn't been able to trace, the fact that she very well could have died and left Elena and Jeremy without anyone at all after they had lost so much, that she had been treated like an fragile accessory rather than a partner. Jenna didn't' have to think about it in order to make her face harden, making Alaric look more frightened still. He took his arm away from her shoulders so that he could instead take both of her hands into his own.

"I know," he told her. "I know, and I'm sorry. What can I do to make this okay?"

Jenna looked at the stage, where the two drunk girls were now scrambling up the steps in anticipation of their big debut, giggling and falling against each other as they went, and then back at Alaric. She didn't say anything. Damon started pushing buttons on his phone, muttering about how he knew that there was a video function on there somewhere.

*  
"Well, I saw him standing there by the record machine, I knew he must 'a been about seventeen," Jenna bellowed into the microphone without caring that she was wildly off-tune and that the only reason that she and Alaric were faring so well was because one of the girls who had preceded them had wrapped up her performance by falling off of the stage. The bouncer had had to move quickly to help her up and away from several good Samaritans who probably weren't so good. She felt like she had when she had been an undergrad, old enough to know when she was being ridiculous and still young enough not to care, before vampires, nieces who weren't hers by biology but still were in every other way that mattered, nephews whose miraculous turnarounds suddenly made a lot more sense. Handsome men with issues and their questionable friends; fair enough, maybe she couldn't say that that last one was entirely new.

"The beat was goin' strong, playin' my favorite song," Alaric followed along gamely enough, though he looked as if he might very well take Damon's cell phone from him and put it somewhere that it didn't belong the second that he exited the stage. He looked Jenna's way, and one side of his mouth crooked into a slight smile. Jenna thought, _Damn it._ If she was still going to pick out handsome men with issues, though, she had to admit that she thought she had finally managed to find herself a good one this time. After he had been punished, because there were several more lyrics and a chorus left, they weren't going anywhere until she had seen every glorious second of it.

When their song was done, they stumbled off of the stage together, Jenna maybe willing to admit that she was leaning against Alaric a touch more than he was leaning on her. That was the kicker about being responsible and grown-up, her once-famed ability to drink any frat boy who challenged her straight under the table had been shot to hell. Alaric tugged her to the side before they could get back to the table as another giggling cadre of girls who looked as if they might have gotten in on fake IDs pushed past them for their own turn, nudged her into a shadowy place that was about as private as they were going to get.

"Are we going to be okay?" he asked her, forehead resting against her and fingers on her hips. His breath smelled like scotch; Jenna just now realized that he had been like that more than once when she had seen him. She guessed that being a big, bad vampire hunter was a hard life. She also guessed that she could still kick him right in the shins for keeping something like that from her.

"Depends," Jenna answered. She put her hands over Alaric's and felt him tense, but she didn't make him let go of her. "Are you ever going to lie to me about something like this again?"

"I _thought_ that was I was protecting you," Alaric said, grimacing a little bit on the emphasis like even he knew that he wasn't going to be convincing anyone with that.

"And now I have a scar on my stomach," Jenna answered. She wasn’t sorry for the way that Alaric flinched, but she did let go of his hand long enough to lightly cup his chin so that they were looking at each other. "Once upon a time, maybe I would have thought that that was dashing and romantic—" No, she wouldn't have even then, but she would have settled it with an impromptu bonfire featuring all of his Soundgarden CDs and a few colorful rumors around campus. "But I have two teenagers who depend on me to be the adult. _I'm_ supposed to be the one protecting _them_ , not the other way around." She let go of Alaric's chin and realized that he had her nudged against a wall where she couldn't step back. Responsibility, turned out that it was a hell of a buzz-kill. "So don't do it again, because now I have all kinds of blackmail material over Stefan if I need someone to kick your ass."

Alaric snorted out a laugh so undignified that Jenna could not help a giggling peal of her own and kissed her hard, mostly drunkenness and relief before it started turning into something else. They had been going to get to know each other again tonight, Jenna remembered. She had been looking forward to it. She fisted her hands through the front of Alaric's shirt and pulled him back down onto her mouth hard when he would have come up for air.

"Wow," Damon said calmly, several minutes in and just when even Jenna was thinking that she needed air, a fresh application of gloss, and another drink, more or less in that order. Jenna wasn't surprised that he had crept up on them quietly enough so that neither of them had noticed. She also wasn't entirely surprised that he had his cell phone out and had been filming them the entire time. "I'm not even sure you can put that onto the regular YouTube."

"Damon," Alaric started, sounding like someone chiding a recalcitrant sibling. Jenna could remember those conversations well. She also remembered that there were faster ways to get one's point across.

Jenna reached out, took Damon's phone from his hands, and snapped it neatly in two. "Darn," she said as she let the pieces fall to the floor. "I am so clumsy when I'm drunk."

Damon looked down at the broken bits and lifted his eyebrow, making a faint hmmming noise from the back of his throat. Jenna thought that his eyes glittered black for put a second before he looked up at Alaric and said cheerfully, "We should have killed someone in front of her a long time ago."

*

Damon was driving Alaric's car, and taking great joy in hitting the corners hard enough to put the vehicle up on two wheels for a few seconds before it slammed back down and made the axles creak. Jenna yelped and then giggled as she was hurled back down onto Alaric, and his grip on her ass briefly tightened.

"Why did we let him drive?" Alaric muttered against Jenna's mouth. When they passed under a green light, his face was briefly lit up, and Jenna saw that her lipstick was smeared across Alaric's chin.

"Because we're drunk?" Jenna offered helpfully. Damon swerved and took them over a pothole. Jenna squealed again as she was nearly hurled into the floorboard, and only Alaric's arm around her waist saved her. He put his hand under her blouse as he settled her down on top of him again, fingers against the scar. When Jenna's breath caught, they looked at each other for a second, and then she kissed him.

"Because you're saving me from having to subscribe to the Playboy Channel back there," Damon answered cheerfully. He had had at least as much to drink as Jenna or Alaric, but his movements didn't seem sluggish or hampered, and his eyes still glittered when he caught Jenna's eye in the rearview mirror and grinned. The reflected glow of the streetlights made his eyes and teeth seem nearly the same color.

"You can't afford the fucking Playboy Channel?" Jenna asked over her shoulder, and then to Alaric, "Aren't vampires all supposed to be rich?"

"He can't compel Comcast over the phone," Alaric replied. His eyes were heavy-lidded, his hand was moving slowly back and forth across the small of her back. Yeah, Jenna remembered what they had been planning on doing tonight, and it was pretty obvious that Alaric had never forgotten.

Damon braked them in front of Jenna's house, more gently than Jenna would have thought. "Home safe and sound, kids," he called over his shoulder, tipping one of them a wink, Jenna wasn't sure which one. She was willing to lay money down that it was Alaric. "'Ric, I'll be sure to bring your baby back safe and sound in the morning."

"Fuck you will," Alaric said immediately, making Jenna laugh. He sat up with her still pooled in his lap, snaked his hand over the divide between the front and back seats, and plucked his keys away from Damon with much less fear than most people would have shown—probably should have shown—while taking objects away from a vampire. "Come on, Jenna." He first helped her out of the car, and then gallantly fished about in the floorboard for the shoes that she had somehow lost on the drive back. Jenna leaned up against the side of the vehicle and propped her elbow up against the open driver's window, through which Damon was peering out at her. He didn't seem particularly perturbed to be in a car to which he no longer had the keys.

"Well, Jenna, I have to say," he told her. "You are very cool."

"I'm willing to allow that for a skulking night-thing, you might not be entirely terrible," Jenna said amiably, before reaching through the window and pinching his cheek. "Now stay the fuck away from my niece." Damon laughed without seeming particularly threatened while Alaric handed Jenna her shoes. She padded barefoot across the lawn with Alaric close behind, holding hands like they were sixth-graders out on their first date together down to the corner store for Slushees. Jenna weighed the tequila-warmth rolling down her limbs together with how good Alaric's hand felt in hers and thought that maybe being the adult in a situation didn't suck so much. Lights flicked on in the lower story, and Elena peered out the front door owlishly at Jenna and Alaric.

"Aunt Jenna?" she asked. "Where have you been? And are you—" Elena's eyes widened slightly. "Are you _drunk_?"

Jenna hadn't realized how late it was. She leaned up against the doorframe for a moment while Alaric leaned up against her and studied the way that Elena was careful to stay inside the house rather than coming onto the porch, even with Jenna. She had been doing that for over a year now. Jenna couldn't believe how much she had missed.

"Yes," she said firmly. "Yes, I am." Jenna came into the house and, when the door had shut behind them and they were all safe again, whatever that meant, put her hand gently against Elena's cheek. "I know why you did what you did," she said. Elena's eyes went wide. "Yeah, that. I know. I understand, and I appreciate the sentiment." Jenna waited. "But you are also so, so grounded. We'll talk in the morning." She continued up the stairs with Alaric following close behind her.

Alaric whispered into her ear, "So, I take it that you're going to be at the boardinghouse next time?"

"Oh, you're damned right that I am," Jenna murmured back. They shut the bedroom door behind them.

"Hell of a date night, right?" Alaric said to her.

Jenna grinned and replied, "Believe it or not, I've actually had worse."

End


End file.
